pbourke

Wasn’t SAP mostly grown through development instead of acquisition? Oracle was the one hovering up companies.

If you think about it, all of those niches were naturally unbundled. The people who were looking for vacation rentals had no need to also look for gig work within the same product. The same isn’t true of enterprise transactions - everything is always related, with cross-function impact. There is always a GL that needs to be updated, you need a common vendor list, budget allocation constrains procurement, and on and on.

> The entire post-WWII world order has been to their benefit at our expense.

The USD is the world’s reserve currency and the US has benefitted enormously from 75 years of peace in Europe.

Also, it’s not like new(ish) ICE cars won’t make it into the California market after this change goes into effect. Arizona is right next door, and cars can be imported between states (assuming that they do not prevent this from happening). Plus, over 10 years a used car market will develop in EVs, along with supporting industries like battery reconditioning and replacement.

You are arguing for the perfect over the good. Transitioning from gas to electric fuel in cars is hard but achievable in 15 years. Reconfiguring the built environment for the entire country is unachievable.

I see someone taking a rhetorical device literally. The point the person that you responded to was making, obviously, is that the cost of living - and in particular of housing - is high and rising in many areas with strong tech job markets.

cannot agree more. "Hell will freeze over before I click that link, but I'm interested in the discussion" was my first thought.

> It prioritizes concision and an abstracted ideal of "readability"[1] at the expense of mental model and ease of use.

That statement applies to all format strings, which are by necessity a small internal DSL. For the = syntax, the input is copied directly to the output with the value of the variable appended. Within the realm of language features, sure it's one more chocolate wafer of syntax. Within the realm of format strings, it's certainly more straightforward than the type conversion and padding syntax.

> That particular "=" syntax is really mostly just useful for dumping runtime state at debug time.

In scientific / ML development that's like 80% of the work.

“=“ has been a great addition to F-strings. It allows you to reduce duplication for labeled output. For example:

  count = 10
  size = 1000032
  area = 3.14159 * (32 ** 2)
  
  print(f"{count=} {size=:,} {area=:,.2f}")

will output this

  count=10 size=1,000,032 area=3,216.99

> Similar experience on Ford.com for most vehicles

At least for Ford F-series trucks, you must place the order through a dealer. You can build the truck online and take the build to the dealer for the order. In my experience the online build tool is sophisticated enough that it properly reflects the real order entry system. Not sure if it’s the same for the rest of the models.

I suspect that you wouldn’t react as strongly to a smug assertion that the USA is a basket case.

It’s okay to admit that the US has done immigration well. It has. There are a great many things that Japan does better than the US. We can discuss them without taking umbrage.

Tougher building codes and lower prices are opposing demands. Tougher codes mean it’s more expensive to build or retrofit. Zoning is to land as codes are to structures - tougher zoning = higher prices.

I was confused about something in this article. After the natural gas is synthesized, it’s pumped into the existing NG infrastructure for heating and electricity generation? Doesn’t that emit CO2 into the atmosphere once again? Or is it such that CO2 removed >> CO2 added?

My n=1 observation is that these bogus listings cause me to either find a well-known brand and/or go somewhere else that has more trustworthy listings.

Once you learn the basics of pip/venv that should mostly work for everything.

Make a new venv for everything and don’t pollute the global environment and it should be fine.

How is it adding utility vs the usual ways that you can access this information? (Paper boarding pass, mobile phone, public flights board)

It gets even more complicated when some areas have emergency and non-emergency converged to 911 like my county in WA does.

I don’t know why this was downvoted - it has the ring of truth. If you could wave a magic wand and do away with fossil fuels tomorrow it would bring untold suffering on the world.

We have to wind the engine down while shifting the work over to a parallel electric motor that we’re in the process of building.

Canada does not have long-term fixed rate mortgages either.

I don’t get this originalist argument. After it’s introduction, OOP very clearly evolved in a professional direction almost immediately. Why would you erase that history, and the work of hundreds to thousands of people working on object technologies, because it wasn’t the original conception?

I think this view has changed over time. Polonius’ advice was my late father’s favourite passage in Shakespeare. I was surprised, at university for a degree in Literature, to hear that it was thought of as a bunch of passé rambling.

And nowadays I agree 100% with my dad - it’s great advice.

> Construction is an efficient business

It doesn’t feel very efficient, especially residential construction. My neighbor is building a garage with some finished space above. It’s sat without a garage door for literally months now - everything else is done.

I often wonder how soon into the project was the garage door ordered and how was that order tracked? Was the lead time calculated and a fallback option presented? These are things that we just take as a matter of course in software. They are also routine in industries that are software-intensive (finance, insurance, retail, to a lesser extent logistics)

The construction business - especially residential construction and remodeling - seem insanely inefficient to me. Jobs that should take a few days of wall clock time often take weeks due to poor planning and scheduling.

It’s interesting that certain high value specialties within construction end up being extremely efficient. You can get a new HVAC system (assuming that you don’t need to install ductwork) in a couple of days. Ditto for a new roof or a new driveway. The process is finely tuned.

It would be wonderful to have the ability to apply computational power to jobs that are not as repeatable today. Scan the house and identify constraints. Automatically design the systems, measurements and layout and assemble a BOM to minimize the effects of supplier lead times. Submit detailed RFPs to subcontractors and track their performance to plan. Etc.

In the US, there is still a 30% federal tax credit for ground source heat pumps as well. Many of the other energy credits have sunset (such as solar, I think)

Edit: it’s 26% this year and 22% next year.

Mini splits seem to be pretty reliable. They’re very common outside of North America. Most of the leading manufacturers seem to be from Japan (Mitsubishi, Fujitsu, Daikin)

Ground source heat pumps are 2-3x the cost of air source, and require a decent sized piece of land for installing the ground loop. Vertical installations use less surface area but are even more expensive since you’re drilling holes 400’ deep for the loop.

Water source heat pumps are easier installations but require houses sited near a specific type of fresh water source that does not fully ice over in the winter or dry up in the summer.

Presumably the 30 year old furnace is replaced or supplemented with a new heat pump.

I have realized an approximately $500 yearly savings by replacing an older electric tank water heater with a hybrid electric (heat pump) water heater so I can believe that claim.

I don’t know what you would consider “deeply structural,” but not having influence over the money supply seems fairly structural. Going back further, the issues are larger: not having a central bank, not having a single currency, no deposit insurance, etc.

> While there were panics and issues before the era of active central banks, most fo the time, things were calm.

Wow - this is insanely inaccurate. Before the active central bank era (call it post-WW2), recessions lasted up to twice as long as they do during the modern era. Unemployment also peaked at much higher numbers: 25% during the Great Depression, for example. The pre-central bank localized agrarian and early industrial economic model leant itself to boom and bust cycles eg massive instability.

BBB wasn’t enacted, though? Are you thinking of the infrastructure package?

I wonder how many taxpayers are claiming the mortgage interest deduction nowadays after the rise in standard deduction.